ARCHIVE PAGE 37 - August 2007

Previous posts that appeared on the front page of comic book brain.com

The Spirit #9 "Wordy"

Darwyn Cook

The Spirit #9
October 2007 Cover Date
DC Comics $2.99 Cover Price

Darwyn Cooke's strengths has been his simple-looking, clean design sense and his brevity in writing. In The Spirit #8 and now with this issue (#9) that brevity is pushed out of the way, and a wordy, text heavy storm swarms over these pages. Cooke is making single panels do double and triple duty supporting all this verbiage, and it is just a hard slog to get through the story.

from Harold Gray, 1939

Jack Kirby Superman

The Jerry Siegal family has been battling the owner of DC Comics' Time Warner over who legally owns the "Superboy" copyright. Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegal created Superman in 1931, (or 1933 or even 1934 depending on which story is accepted), according to the 2004 book by Gerard Jones titled Men of Tomorrow (see pages 109-110). They sold the rights to Superman for $130.00 (or so I have read) but apparently the deal is murkier on the sale of the later "Superboy" character. You can read more about it at the textfiles blog here.

An article from Sequart Research & Literacy Organization from 2004 suggests that DC Comics may have trouble dealing with a 2013 copyright transfer deadline. That article Sequart. A key remark is:

"In 1998, Joanne Siegel (Jerome's widow) and Laura Siegel Larson (his daughter) filed the papers necessary to terminate Jerome's assignment of copyright to DC. As copyright law had extended the length of copyrights, it had also provided a means for creators to terminate their transfer of copyright -- a means of not forcing people who signed under state-of-the-law X to abide by state-of-the-law Y. Thus, 56 years after the transfer of copyright, creators have a five-year window of time to file for that transfer's termination. This allows the present copyright holders all they could have received under the old law, while still allowing the original holders to prevent their transferred copyright from being extended without compensation. "